


Living

by TrenchcoatButtons



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, So is Jaime, its just me my mediocre writing and these tits on this bitch of an earth, lyanna mormont is not in this story but she's alive, sandor clegane is a fucking level 20 barbarian okay he can survive the fall damage I DID THE MATH, some free range organic fix-it fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-29
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-03-27 12:41:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19013113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrenchcoatButtons/pseuds/TrenchcoatButtons
Summary: Sandor Clegane is alive. He tries to figure out what that should mean.





	Living

**Author's Note:**

> 1- In August of 2004, Christine McKenzie fell 11,000 feet when both her parachute and backup parachute malfunctioned and failed to open. Her fall was broken by several power lines she hit on the way down, which absorbed the majority of the energy of the fall to reduce impact. She survived with a broken pelvis and some bruising. 
> 
> 2- During his time in the armed forces, Bear Grylls' parachute failed to inflate, causing him to fall 16,000 feet to the ground. He landed on his parachute pack, and while he suffered a broken back and required 12 months of 10-hour-a-day physiotherapy, he made a recovery and went on to be Bear frickin' Grylls.
> 
> 3- In January of 1972, Vesna Vulovic was ejected from a plane when a bomb went off, causing it to break apart in midair. The incident killed everyone on board save for Vulovic, who fell an estimated 33,000 feet to the ground. She suffered dozens of broken bones, spent 16 months in the hospital, and was in a coma for 27 days. She made a full recovery, and holds the record for highest fall survived without a parachute.
> 
> This is not beta'd and is probably incredibly disjointed and out of character? I dunno, I've never written GoT characters. This is mostly show-based with book influence.

He recalls falling. Recalls grappling with his brother on the rushing descent into fire and death, a horrible tug of war that bruised his arms and left his weak, bloody eyes unfocused.

Then… Then somehow he’d gotten an arm around Gregor’s meaty neck, squeezed until the lump of flesh that was his brother flailed beneath him because the wind was moving so fast and the heat was growing greater every second- and then he’d looked up, or so he’d felt it was up, perhaps it was down, the world was cataclysmic, all fire and wind and stone. He tilted his head, and saw fire coming up to meet him.

And in the fire he _saw_.

 

**Four wolves racing to the corners of the earth. A mountain split in twain. A great dragon, spouting gouts of flame before it withered and split. Twin streams of blood, twisting and shaping until they formed the snowy tundras of the north. A handful of wolves- or were they dogs?- gamboled joyfully in the fresh powder. An elegant red wolf circled them, keeping them safe. A great black creature looms beyond them, and Sandor cannot tell if it means them harm or health.**

 

Finally the fire was just fire, and Sandor Clegane knew no more.

Now though, now he seems to be awake. Or maybe dead. Maybe the seven are about to rip him in twain for his disbelief as much as his sins.

Except the longer he lays there, the less he feels as though the Maiden is about to kick his head in with a delicate foot. He tries to move, and a great pain rattles through his arm and down into his leg. He knows that pain, he’s felt it before- burning. Sharp and crippling and forcing out of him a weak cry as Sandor jerks himself away from the feeling. It follows, but he tumbles onto his back, and the pain dulls some. He stares up and sees a line of blue sky, the crumbling structure of the Red Keep.

He is alive.

Fucking hells. He’s alive.

Fire burns wildly around him, smoke obscuring whatever sliver of the sky available. It churns around him, heat and ash and embers, until his vision blurs. Alive, yes, but only long enough for the gods to burn him to death, it seems.

He passes out.

The second time he wakes, it is silent. There is ash across every single surface, and a handful of fires still burn among rubble and ruin.

He manages, though he isn’t sure how, to sit up. He has to take stock.

The arm is fucked, possibly beyond repair. It isn’t his sword arm, but it hangs completely limp at his side, a sliver of bone poking out above the elbow. Unless he is very very lucky, that arm is done for.

But he did just survive a fall he never could have imagined, so who can say?

The rest is as he expected. Bruises. Breaks. Burns. Burns along his right arm and down his side, charred cloth and blackened armor having protected him from the worst of it, but heat is heat and fire is fire, and he can feel the tight, agonizing throb of his own skin in places. It still isn’t as bad as the day Gregor held his face into the fire, and he can’t smell anything but smoke and ash.

Gregor… Sandor’s eyes are not ruined, he comes to find, blinking away crusted blood and squinting, widening them, squinting again. There is a blur to one eye, but he can see enough. And he sees, a few feet to the side of him, his brother’s corpse.

And this time, it is a corpse.

Thick black blood has oozed around him, and from the way his arms and legs lay it appears as though every single part of Gregor has shattered on impact. His head is pulp, a mash of green and black and ash. Somehow, his brother’s body must have dampened Sandor’s own impact.

Sandor is alive.

Gregor is dead.

For the first time, he feels that a measure of justice has been served. But not for him, the man.

There is a burned boy laying in a bed far away in the Westerlands. He is paralyzed with pain, weak with it, alive only for the fact that he cannot move from the agony and therefore all he can do is heal. The Maester’s salves and the maid’s care are all that keep him going. Certainly not his father’s grimace, certainly not his mother and sister, dead some years ago now, and certainly not Gregor. Gregor, who comes to his room late in the night with a lit torch, to stand at the foot of his bed as if preparing to finish the job. But it never comes. The boy pants and gasps and sweats, and there are small pops from the fire, and in it’s light he sees Gregor’s face, never smiling, only hating.

That’s what it’s always been about, he thinks deliriously. That boy, that bed, that fire.

Against the pain, Sandor manages to stand, clutches his ruined arm close to his side, and turns towards the city gates. Limps and drags himself through ash, past fire and stone.

He doesn’t give Gregor a second glance.

 

===

 

Somehow he ends up in the Northern camp. He isn’t wearing Lannister colors, and the chaos is too great for anyone to really nitpick about the Hound showing up unannounced. He merely arrives, sinks down in the triage line, and waits.

He’s never really been on this side of the battle before, the aftermath. Every Maester and able-bodied nurse available is stretched thin, the wails and cries interspersed with gentle shushing, hummed songs, words of peace. He’d never stuck around for this before, always off with a wineskin or some sort of military debriefing or the planning of another attack. Now he can only sit while a smooth-faced young man with a steel and black iron Maester chain assesses his wounds.

Sandor’s eyes will heal, with time, the burns along his sides will also heal, and the youth surmises that the scarring will not be as great as-

 

 _As what I already have?_ He sneers, but he is too exhausted to anything but growl.

 _Yes,_ says the lad. _What’s important is you are here, and you are whole._

 

The arm is a different matter, and the only thing that’s to be done is bite hard on an offered belt and muscle through the pain of his bones being set. When it’s over he is sweating and drowsy with fatigue, arm wrapped tight as a drum all the way up to the shoulder. A sling keeps it bent against his chest.

Sandor guzzles down an offered waterskin, and in the moment, it’s as good as any wine he’s ever had.

Sleep comes easy.

 

===

 

Weeks pass. He is among some of the less hurt, oddly enough. Silently and gruffly, he doles out soup and bread with his good hand. He stays among the injured, rests a lot, helps where he is able and provides a looming presence to any would-be vultures who lurk to take advantage of the infirm.

Word of the Dragon Queen’s death does reach them, and it leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. Sandor doesn’t give two rat shits about who sits on the throne, but after all this?

Lots of lives gone just for the Queen to be dead at the hand of her own lover.

But that’s war, sometimes. Sandor watches the sun sink below the bay some nights and tries to think about what the Elder Brother would say.

 

_I’m a fucking Septon, what was I supposed to say?_

 

He snorts. Gives a young girl his good hand to squeeze while her bandages are changed.

Arya shows up on week three, bearing supplies arrived from Duskendale. She meets his eye across the muddied ground and he cannot help the smirk that spreads across his face when the wolf’s mouth drops open. She hands off a crate to the nearest hands that are not hers and half runs across to meet him.

 

_You- you-_

_Use your words, girl._

_You- look like shit._

 

That elicits a bark of laughter from him, and he nods. Sandor knows. The bruises on his face are yellowed and grey, eyes sunken dark with bruise even while his vision has come clear. The arm strapped tight to his side, the burns that travel even further down his neck than before- made more obvious by the shave and haircut some well-meaning nurse gave him when he was still too weak to argue.

 

_Well. Couldn’t be the pretty one forever._

It’s a jape, and it surprises even him when it comes out of his mouth. Arya lets out a single laugh and sits down beside him in the dirt.

 

_It’s good to see you, Sandor._

_Mm._

 

They talk. Jaime killed Cersei, she says. Tyrion found him half buried in the rubble with his legs crushed. They’re saying he’ll likely never walk again, but Bran has sent ravens ahead of himself with instructions on how to build a wheeled chair such as his. Jon Snow is in a cell, Tyrion has spent the last few weeks caring for his brother, the city is hanging on. 

He tells her about Gregor, about the battle. About his fall and the things he’d seen in the fire. Confides in her about Beric and Thoros and the things he’d seen before, at the farm.

 

_What’s it all mean, you think?_

_Don’t know. Wolves are your territory, not mine._

_Wolves and hounds are pretty close. What’s your plan?_

_Plan? I’ve got no plan, I wasn’t supposed to survive that shite, seven knows why I did._

_Stupid. You really are dense- you have a vision about wolves and snow and blood, and you’ve got no idea what you want to do?_

 

He snarls at her, a proper bark from what remains of the Hound.

 

 _North,_ he relents _. Could be. Might be._

_You best go soon. Sansa and Bran will be here by week’s end, all the heads of great houses will be. They have to figure out what to do, and you know Sansa will insist on the North’s independence._

Things won’t be quiet-relatively- for much longer then.

_You think we’re about to jump into another war, then?_

She shrugs. _If the last few weeks have taught me anything, it’s that I’m lucky Sansa is the political one and not me. I couldn’t do it. Bloody hell don’t want to, either._

_Little bird is strong, always was._

 

Arya gives him a funny look, but otherwise doesn’t comment on his nickname for her sister.

 

_Oh, I have something for you!_

 

The wolf girl gets up and disappears, and within the hour she returns leading a horse behind her. A familiar one, a great black destrier that Sandor had deemed lost to him.

 

_Found him outside the city. Figured… well I thought, since, you were gone…_

 

She was going to take care of Stranger for him. The creature is snorting at him, tail lashing back and forth, hooves cutting into the dirt beneath them. He’s always been an emotional horse, and Sandor lets the animal bite at his palm a few times before Stranger begins to settle. **How fucking dare you?** The stallion seems to say. The velvety nose breathes hot against Sandor’s fingers, letting his master stroke down the forelock.

Man, girl, horse. A few furious little things slot evenly into place.

 

===

 

He doesn’t go north yet, though he’s decided that is what he’ll do. He waits another three weeks for that fresh-faced Maester to assess his arm. The elbow is healing crooked, they can both see that right away. But the Maester seems insistent that as long as he move it, keep it from tensing and going stiff, that he should find his ability to use it return in time. So he does, painfully stretches and carefully extends the arm back and forth each day. By the time he’s fully back on his feet and able to ride Stranger, King Bran the Broken already sits as lord of the SIX kingdoms.

The seventh, the north, remains for the Starks.

Arya bids him a goodbye, says she’s going to travel. For a bit.

 

_What about your blacksmith boy?_

 

The flush on her face is deeply amusing.

 

 _I’m not- we’ve spoken. A bit. Cleared some things up._ The years melt away for a moment, and she is a girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing, or who she’s supposed to be again. _I won’t be gone for good. I’ll come back._

There is a tense moment, and then Arya reaches out to grip his hand. _Do me a favor- when you go north, check in on Sansa? She’ll be… glad to see you. And she’s going to be alone up there. Brienne is staying on here, with the Lannister and my brother._

 

He doesn’t say anything about Arya being the only sibling to willingly leave her family, because he is a cruel man but he is not a monster anymore. The Stark children have been gone a long way in the dark, they are due the chance to find their way out.

So he agrees. It’s not a very hard thing to agree to.

Much like the last time they said goodbye, Sandor feels his chest tighten.

 

 _Arya,_ for an instant her grey eyes spark Tully blue. _You remember where the heart is?_

 

She smiles.

 

===

 

Winter seems to have slowed it’s violent approach ever since the undead army was beaten. It still arrives, blustery and miserable, but there are still sunny days to be had, and the journey from King’s Landing back up to the north is less shit than he imagined it would be. He tags along with a group of northmen under House Mormont’s banner, the lot of whom are eager to return to their little lady of Bear Island.

He doesn’t really blame them. She’d killed a giant and lived to tell the tale- and she was younger than he’d been when he made his first kill.

Usually, Sandor would have preferred a solitary journey, but being in a group does have certain comforts to it. For one, there is a wagon, and they need stop for supplies far less than he would have had to were he on his own- and there is a level of security in having enough people to have watch shifts during the icy nights. It’s not quite the same comradery of the Elder Brother and the Quiet Isle, but it’s similar.

The journey goes easy. Frigid nights lead into days that thaw the layers of frost off their noses, warm their backs and make it far less miserable than it might have been were they neck-deep in winter.

Still, by the time a moon has passed and they’ve reached Winterfell, Sandor is glad to be off the road. His arm has healed crooked, jutting out at the elbow in an odd curve that it did not possess before, and when he holds his hands out before himself, he can see that one is now a bit shorter than the other.

The place is… well, better than he last saw it. It’s been cleaned a great deal in the last three months, rubble cleared and scorch marks scrubbed away. Several walls he can see are in the process of being repaired, wooden scaffolding appearing here and there as they pass inside. People mill about, men, women, and children bundled up against the cold and going about their business, their lives, their recovery.

He lets the Bear Island men go and meet with the Lady of the keep, and Sandor goes to the stables instead. He brushes off the stable hands, barking at them to bugger off, it’s his horse and he’ll board him how he sees fit. They scurry away with ‘yes’s’ and ‘my lord’s’ that leave him feeling prickly and irate.

Stranger snorts next to his stump of an ear, and Sandor scowls.

So maybe he’s stalling a bit. Fuck him for being a bit unsure of how to approach Queen Sansa fucking Stark.

‘Little bird’ likely won’t fly in these walls anymore.

“Clegane? Seven hells, they said you were dead.”

He turns, in the process of brushing Stranger down. A thick-set man with curly brown mutton chops is standing in the corridor of the stables, arms crossed and looking baffled.

“They were wrong,” he grunts. “I know you?”

“Likely not. Colrin Selmy, I’m Stablemaster here now.”

“Selmy? Fuck you doing up here?”

He’s a jolly looking man, with high cheeks and a shine to his nose. “Her Grace offered a place in the North to anyone displaced from King’s Landing. I’m not enough to inherit anything, so I brought my family with her retinue when they returned.”

“Mmhm. Everyone else think I’m dead, then?”

“Could be. Rumor mill says you went into the Red Keep and didn’t come back out. With how that went down,” he grins at his own wordplay. “It was well assumed that you went with it.”

“Well I didn’t. She really taking southerners in up here?”

“Aye. Winterfell and the North took heavy blows, lost a lot of good men. Lady Sansa- Her Grace. She’s been awful good to any and all come looking for work and aid.”

Sounded about right. Sandor found himself bristling. Ridiculous. Admirable. Colrin was still going.

“I’ll tell Lanard you’re here so he can bring you up. She’ll be wanting to see you, you’re a bit of a hero around here, you know.”

Sandor sputtered. “What?”

Colrin shrugs. “You fought the dead. You saved Lady Arya. Saved quite a few men, from what I hear. Her Grace should be glad to see you alive.”

Before Sandor can start off on something about heroes and how he’d sooner wipe his own ass with whatever fairytale they’ve cooked up about him than listen to one more word about it, Colrin is gone.

He seethes, and Stranger leans his great head out to bite at Sandor’s shoulder.

 

The memory of a soft hand on his, a gentle voice singing to the mother in a night full of green fire. And another memory. From after the battle with the dead. A figure in a dark hood, watching him saddle Stranger in the pre-dawn gloom.

 

_Look after Arya, will you?_

_Shouldn’t you be abed?_

_Don’t treat me like a child. I know what you’re going to do- you made it clear last night._

 

The silence stretched.

 

_I know she’s going to leave, too. You’re both rather alike. Keep her alive, if you can._

_I won’t let any harm come to her, little bird._

_Thank you…_

 

Hand on his again, and small fingertips against the burnt side of his chin. The smell of horse and hay and lemon.

 

_Be careful, Sandor._

 

He’d been about as careful as things allowed- throwing himself and Gregor off the Red Keep maybe didn’t fit that description, but he’d kept the wolf bitch alive and manage to survive at the same time. So maybe he need not tell the world everything about what had happened up there. The prospect of… it had seemed an unspoken thing, that he not survive this last journey.

Had Arya not told people he lived? Little bitch would have to answer to that if he ever saw her face again.

Sandor spent several long minutes with Stranger, enjoying the relative peace inside the stables. The beast had stuck with him through the last tumultuous several years, ever faithful and ever ornery. He feeds the stallion a few weak little carrots, strokes his great neck, and eventually pulls himself away from the warmth of the stables to the bitter chill outdoors. There’s another jovial looking man waiting for him on the steps into the keep, who only manages to inform him that the Lady of the keep is in the Godswood before he’s interrupted. Sandor growls, brushes past him before he can get anything else out.

“I know enough where it is, move along!

He stomps past the Steward, who seems ruffled enough that Sandor smirks on his way past the great hall. Too many people here he’s never seen before being chummy with him. The keep has fresh staff, made replacements, filled roles where before there had been ghosts. It shouldn’t surprise him, but it feels… off.

No one here is familiar, he realizes, as he stalks through the corridors towards the Godswood.

No Arya, no Bran, no Jon, no Brienne. The familiar faces he’d come to associate with Winterfell are absent, and the realization makes the place feel lonely even for him. He wonders how the little bird feels. He supposes he’s about to find out, and steels himself for whatever lay ahead of him. He decides to try not to think at all, about anything. Not about copper hair, or the gentle electricity her fingertips had spread through his knuckles.

Fuck.

Sandor shoves open the door into the Godswood.

 

===

 

She’s not beneath the Heart Tree, like he expected. Instead he finds her across the wood, sitting beside a series of steaming pools. She’s wrapped in dark furs, dire wolf pins keeping her cloak fastened against the bitterness in the air. Sansa Stark paints a pretty picture, all dark blues and greys, red hair in an elegant love knot that tapers down into a braid.

The crunch of his boots alerts her, and suddenly she’s standing, staring at him. Sandor can see the way her breathing quickens, the way she starts to move towards him but stops.

“You’re alive.”

“Aye. I was surprised as you are.”

He doesn’t know what’s going on in her head, he can’t. But he’s not a fool, Winterfell is not the home of her childhood, her siblings have split apart once again, and she will never be the little bird he knew in King’s Landing again. Sandor covers the gap between them until they’re standing only a few feet apart.

She’s nearly up to his chin, these days. He hadn’t quite noticed the last time he was here.

“Arya didn’t tell me, but she told me she was sending a friend to visit before she left. I think she wanted me to be surprised. I’m not sure if letting me believe you were dead is worth it.” Her voice is wry, and he can’t help but huff out a laugh.

“The wolf bitch is certainly full of piss and vinegar, isn’t she?”

Sansa frowns, but it seems halfhearted. She looks him up and down, face falling into something he can’t place. “It’s good to see a familiar face.”

“Even mine?”

“Especially yours.”

His heart throbs almost painfully against his ribcage, and for the first time Sandor is struck by how adult she has become. Despite the fact that he’s roughly fifteen years her senior, she manages to make him feel like a dumbstruck little boy, as if he’s just admitted to stealing a tart from the kitchens before dinner. The silence stretches between them for a while, their breaths coming out in little puffs of fog.

“I shouldn’t have said the things I did to you, before I left,” he blurts out. “About Ramsay, and what he did. If I could bring the fucker back, I’d slit his throat shallow so he died slow.”

She doesn’t say anything, just quirks her head a little to the side, searching him.

“Your sister left me for dead, ages ago. A Septon found me, nursed me to health. I had time. Peace,” it’s more scoff than word. “For a time, I was better than when you knew me. And then- shit kept happening. Shit always happens. Gregor needed to die, even if what I killed wasn’t really Gregor. And it wasn’t the me you knew in King’s Landing that wanted to do it, or even the man I am now.”

It’s strange to be admitting this to her, but he can’t imagine admitting it to anyone else. Sandor lowers his voice and his head, as if he’s afraid someone else is listening in. Lifts a hand to point a finger towards her chest, at the dire wolf pin above her heart. His throat feels tight, pained, but the words make their way out of him all the same. “The girl you were, little bird, was too much like the boy he killed in the fire.”

Whatever noose he’s been carrying around his heart severs, and falls away. Sansa lets out a sharp breath, and removes one of her gloves. Her hand comes up to touch his jaw, elegant fingers drifting through beard to rest on his burned side. She is cold and warm at the same moment, and it makes him ache in a way he thought was lost to him.

“I thought about you. After you left, in the Eyrie, when the Boltons had Winterfell. Whatever you were, however hateful you could be then, you looked out for me. And you didn’t want anything in return for that, you just did it, and that… that meant a great deal to me, Sandor. It always has,” her thumb strokes beneath his eye, and Sandor lets out a great shudder of a gasp at the sensation. Muted against the burns, but still there. “Thinking you dead… broke my heart.”

Somewhere along the line they’d closed up the gap between them.

“Sansa-”

Had he ever called her by her given name before? He can’t remember, he’s too busy focusing on the feeling of her warm palm against his cheek. The way it slid up across his temple and into his hair, the way it stroked downwards back to his jaw. A chill runs through him, completely unrelated to the cold.

She is touching him. She is touching him and nobody has touched him so tenderly in years, not since long ago when his mother still lived. When she hummed some vague tune and wiped tears off his cheeks. She’d died before the burns, had only ever seen him smooth and whole. And Sansa, Sansa had met him at his very worst, touched him at his most loathsome. He’d mocked her for not being able to look at him, but the trouble was that she was too good at seeing. She saw everything, and touched it just the same.

If she dug that small hand into his guts and pulled out his bones, Sandor would be grateful.

He reaches up to clutch at her upper arms, hyper aware of his ability to crush and hurt. But he won’t hurt her, he can’t. Sandor has his own vows now. The wolves in the fire, he understood. She’d been the leader, the protector, and he would be the great beast to watch over her. If that was the reason he’d made it this far, it was a better end than he’d have given himself.

“No one will ever make you sing any songs ever again, little bird. Not me, not anyone. They’ll be freely given, or I’ll cut their throats for wanting one.”

He feels her fingers tighten in his hair, enough that it might hurt if he weren’t Sandor Clegane. Her mouth is on his then, and while the conversation seemed to be leading there, he never thought- Mint, lemon, soft lips and even softer fingertips. He wants. He wants. He wants.

“Would you do anything I asked?” She breathes.

“ _Yes_.”

“Stay. Make Winterfell your home.”

He almost laughs, lets out a huff of breath and tilts his head back to exhale. Then dips back down to kiss her firmly. Once upon a time, that would have been a mighty tall order. But now.

Easy enough.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Sandor's fucked up arm is called a malunion fracture, they are wild looking. He probably could have been more fucked up, but Gregor is a big dude and left plenty of room for cushioning the fall, as far as I'm concerned. Obviously Westeros is not quite an exact parallel to the 15th century of Earth, but the tallest building during that period didn't even hit 600 feet, so if Christine McKenzie's 11,000 foot fall can be broken by a power line and leave her with just a broken pelvis, the Mountain that Moves might as well be a dang feather pillow.
> 
> The vision in the fire feels pretty self explanatory? Sandor and Sansa are going to have a bunch of wolfdog babies and nobody can stop me.
> 
> Might do a companion piece to this for Brienne and Jaime? Because I've been thinking about Jaime losing his legs since episode 5 aired. I also want to get rid of his stupid golden hand and give him a nice, sensible hook.


End file.
